Health Humanities in Times of Crisis
Call for proposals
Submissions due by February 15, 2021
The first annual Health Humanities Symposium at the University of Chicago will explore health in relation to crisis. As we’ve seen throughout this past year, health is a contested personal, cultural, political, and social state, where questions of health and healing intersect with issues of race, gender, class, citizenship, art, education, and more. In this symposium, we welcome a dialogue across disciplinary and methodological boundaries with those invested in grappling with the role of humanistic work in both crises and futures of recovery, renewal, and restoration.
Using the form below, the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry at the Smart Museum of Art invites all graduate students to submit proposals in the form of artistic media, original papers, panels or workshops, and presentations. We encourage submissions from disciplines such as: allied health professions, area studies, arts and health, humanities, interdisciplinary studies, narrative medicine, media/film studies, medicine, nursing, philosophy and bioethics, science and technology studies, social sciences, and/or social work.
Potential topics that might be addressed include:
- What is the role of the health humanities in times of crisis? How do the health humanities seek both healing and justice?
- How does humanistic work make sense of pressing issues – such as ableism, climate change, racism, police violence, vaccines, war, or women’s reproductive rights – that have immense implications across multiple communities?
- What are the opportunities and challenges of practitioners or policymakers oriented to the health humanities in times of crisis?
- In what ways do grassroots movements orient to the health humanities in challenging systems and structures?
- In moments of crisis, how can the health humanities offer understanding of contested points of view?
- How do representations of health in language, film, art, or media make sense of the complex meanings of health and illness?
- What desired futures can health humanities imagine for individual and collective health?
Questions?
Contact Lauren Beard, Medical Humanities Graduate Intern at the Smart Museum of Art or Aaron Wilder, Academic Engagement Coordinator at the Smart Museum of Art.